Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves

by Jacqueline Yallop

  In the end, it was not until the beginning of April that the Schreibers managed to return. It was a few days before Easter, and in the warmer weather it was a pleasure to stroll together around the busy port and into the labyrinth of lanes behind. The town gardens were beginning to blossom, there was more life in the streets, and it was easy to spend the spring hours idling in front of shop windows. Doors were thrown open to the street, and the alluring treasure in the dark interiors twinkled in the spring sunlight. The Schreibers were not here to dawdle, however; their minds were fixed on retrieving their treasure from Kryser’s. But, when they reached the shop, Kryser pretended that he had never seen either of them before, even though they had both shopped there on many previous occasions. Worse still, he denied all knowledge of the sale a few months earlier.

  Puzzled and annoyed, the Schreibers clattered up the wooden steps to the top rooms of Kryser’s shop and there found the bowl and bottle. Kryser’s memory, however, still refused to be jogged. He was adamant that no previous transaction had ever taken place. The negotiation had to begin again. Finally, a sale was agreed. The Schreibers paid a sovereign, again, for the bottle, and carried it off with them at last. Back at the hotel, their purchases safely carried between them, it was the bottle that took pride of place. Charlotte did not know exactly what it was but she was sure it was uncommon and of the best quality. Perhaps it was Delft china, or perhaps something even rarer. Whatever it was, she was certain they had a bargain. Only a few days later, however, she was upset by a very different valuation. She was in The Hague, hosting a tea party for some friends, fellow travellers from England and old Dutch acquaintances. Charlotte proudly showed off her newly acquired bottle and it elicited a great deal of enthusiastic comment. Hardly anyone there had seen anything like it. They admired its unusual pregnant form and the colours of the decoration. Almost everyone thought, like Charlotte, that it had been a good buy. But one of the guests, the painter Christoffel Bisschop, disagreed. He was an expert on fine Dutch china, so he said, and this was not fine Dutch china. It was German, cheap and ordinary. It was attractive, perhaps, but nothing more than a trinket and essentially worthless.

  The Schreibers had made bad purchases before but Bisschop’s verdict inevitably came as a disappointment. Something about the bottle still excited them, and when the guests had drifted away, and the tea things had been cleared, they talked for a long time about whether or not to keep the bottle, just in case. Pragmatism, in the end, prevailed. They could not afford to encumber themselves with second-rate pieces. They needed to save space, as well as money, for truly rare things – for the very best. So they agreed to resell the bottle, and on arriving in Utrecht a few days later, on 8 April, the matter was settled when a dealer there confidently announced that he knew an amateur collector who would give good money for it. The journal volumes record the Schreibers’ relief: ‘“Then for goodness’ sake let him have it,” said C.S., who had been put thoroughly out of conceit with his purchase, and now only cared to be rid of it.’

  The bottle was left behind, but as the Schreibers passed through Utrecht again six months later, in October 1873, the story begins once more. Relating the tale delightedly in his notes on his mother’s collecting, Montague Guest recounts the dealer’s verdict: ‘“I sold your bottle to the great amateur for 100 florins,”’ the dealer explained. ‘“He took it home and was delighted with it, but in a few days he brought it back to me and would have nothing to say for it, for his friends had told him it was only a piece of German ware and of no value whatever.”’ History, it seemed, was repeating itself. The Schreibers had to take their bottle back, and forgo their hundred florins. Frustrated by the entire experience, Charles was determined not to waste energy on carrying the disappointing bottle to England and a few days later he called at a sale in Antwerp to offload it: ‘He got a letter to inform him that the troublesome bottle had been sold – this time sold outright, and had realized eighteen shillings.’

  The sale represented a financial loss, but at least they were rid of the bottle, and as Charlotte noted stoically, ‘These things will happen to the best regulated collectors.’ Besides, they could be sure to recognize, and avoid, such inconsequential German pottery when they saw it in the future. This might have been some consolation, except that the next time they came across a piece exactly like their bottle was almost a year later, in August 1874, and it was not in a dingy junkshop backroom but in the elegant, beautifully lit cases of the Rouen Museum in Normandy, set on the most conspicuous shelf at the heart of the town’s collection. There, carefully arranged ‘in the very place of honour’, was a group of bottles exactly like the one the Schreibers had dismissed, the same size and strange gourd shape, the same cheerful decoration. Aware that they had made a terrible mistake, they began to investigate further, and as they discovered more about the precious bottles they realized that ‘nothing in Europe, or indeed in any other part of the world, [was] as rare as these productions. . . only about a dozen being hitherto known’.

  In fact, the bottles were so rare that the experts could not agree as to exactly what they were: some claimed that they were the work of Denys Dorio, an obscure Italian who had once made a few such things at Rouen en route to setting up a studio in Holland; others claimed they were seventeenth-century Delft china from the renowned workshop of Aelbrecht de Keiser. Whatever they were, experts agreed that there were few known examples. Two were in a private collection; the rest were at the Rouen Museum. Except, of course, for the one that Charlotte and Charles Schreiber had once owned, that was now somewhere in Holland, sold at an obscure sale for a song. It was infuriating: ‘And now indeed there was wailing and gnashing of teeth! To have been unconsciously possessed of such a treasure, and to have been at such pains to have deprived oneself of it was almost more than amateur nature could endure.’

  The Schreibers returned despondently to England. The thought of what they had lost preyed heavily on them. They did not have the heart to look over the things they had brought back, and they found no comfort in the familiarity of the collection waiting for them at home. All they could think about was what might have been. The weather in England now seemed chill and uninviting; the house seemed dull. They could not bear the thought of admitting their mistake to friends, and within the week they were back on the boat to Brussels, making the choppy Channel crossing and hoping that something would turn up to distract them from their disappointment.

  The shops in the Belgian capital seemed intent on annoying them further; there was little to tempt them. Their latest journey had all the hallmarks of another wasted trip, but it was on this visit to Brussels, almost two years after Charles Schreiber had first spotted and bought the gourd-shaped bottle in Rotterdam, that something unexpected happened. They were about to leave a little-known dealers, Polonet’s, in the newly built Rue Grétry by the covered market, a shop, according to Charlotte, ‘of no great account’. Like the other dealers, Polonet had had nothing to interest them. But, just as they were leaving, Charlotte happened to cast her eyes ‘to a topmost shelf ’ and there saw a bright and familiar object. By some extraordinary luck or accident, some tantalizing twist of fate, the Schreibers had a second chance: in a dark corner of the humble Brussels shop, explained Charlotte in triumph, ‘I spied the lost and much-lamented Rouen gourd-shaped bottle, whose very history is a romance.’

  Polonet had acquired the bottle at the Antwerp sale in the spring and, like many people before him, he guessed that it was nothing more than simple German ware of more decorative than financial value. He had no hope of a great profit. But ‘C.S. . . instantly paid whatever he was asked without demur.’ The price was forty francs, quite a lot of money for a nondescript piece of German pottery. But next-to-nothing for the rare and beautiful work of art that the Schreibers had been tracking across Europe. With a nod of the head and a shake of the hand, the deal was done. The bottle was swiftly dusted and packed, and the Schreibers carried it ‘triumphantly away’.6

  The bottle
did eventually turn out to be German. It was finally identified as a rare faience ceramic vase by one of a group of seventeenth-century studio painters known as the Nuremberg Hausmaler, artists who specialized in decorating ceramics or faience. The vase itself was probably made in Frankfurt, but it was the decoration which made it so eminently collectable, and it is believed it was painted by Hausmaler Abraham Helmback around 1700. The Schreibers treasured it, and, on Charlotte’s death, it was inherited by her daughter Blanche, the Countess of Bessborough, who was herself a keen collector. It remained in the Bessborough family at their home, Stansted Park, on the Hampshire/West Sussex border, until October 1999, when it was sold by Sotheby’s, attracting a guide price of £10,000–£15,000. Charlotte’s investment, it seems, had ultimately been proved a good one.

  For the Schreibers, the protracted story of the bottle ended in a sweet victory that bolstered their confidence in their own judgement. The confusing episode had shown how well-meaning friends and eager dealers could be wrong in their appraisals, and could not be relied upon to give the final word on an object, especially when so much collectors’ pride was at stake. If the best pieces of European treasure were to be extracted from their hiding places, then Charlotte and her husband needed to trust to their own resources. But, for Charlotte, the open display of too much scholarship was not without its own problems. As we have seen, at a time when the intellectual and social activities of respectable women were constantly being scrutinized and judged, those who seemed too learned risked blurring the boundaries between an amateur hobby, which was acceptable, and a professional undertaking, which was not.

  Charlotte was in the potentially awkward position of needing to acquire scholarly knowledge to make her collecting a success, and needing to obscure it to retain her social standing. Like collecting, art criticism remained a staunchly male domain, and there were few women willing to challenge this convention. Those who did had to be prepared to stand out from the crowd and have their names associated with a wide range of feminist causes. One of the best known of these was Emilia, Lady Dilke, who attended the South Kensington Art School in the 1850s before beginning to publish in a range of journals, becoming a contributor to the Saturday Review in 1864 and fine art critic for Academy. By the end of the century, she had published several major works of art history, including two volumes on The Renaissance of Art in France (1879), a critique of Art in the Modern State (1888) and a series of works exploring French architecture, sculpture, engraving and furniture.

  But Emilia was a controversial woman, the subject of much discussion in polite Victorian society. During her unhappy first marriage to Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, and a reputable scholar, she was publicly and frequently unfaithful, as a result of which several thinly veiled portrayals of adulterous wives and cuckolded husbands appeared in popular novels of the time. Her second marriage, to Charles Dilke, also carried a hint of scandal: they were married very shortly after Dilke was publicly named in a divorce case which ended his influential political career. In addition, Emilia’s close association with the trades unions – in particular the Women’s Trade Union League, of which she was president – and with feminist causes such as women’s enfranchisement meant that she continually courted controversy. Certainly, her behaviour provided plenty of ammunition for those in the establishment who wanted to argue that female scholarship led to a breakdown of social order and the undermining of accepted values.

  Another of the rare female art critics was Anna Jameson, who made her way from the twilight existence of a governess to become a woman of letters. In 1842, she wrote a Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art in and near London, and two years later she published A Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in London. Between 1843 and 1845, she contributed over forty essays on Italian painters to journals. Her work was clever, analytical and original. She gained widespread respect for her knowledge and her ability to convey her ideas accessibly: ‘her contemplation of the great works of the great schools was more intelligent than that of men in many ways more learned than she’, observed one later commentator in 1879.7 For her series on Sacred and Legendary Art, which appeared from 1848 until after her death in 1860, she had lengthy discussions with Charles Eastlake, who had been working on a similar theme. Eventually, in a rare act of scholarly magnanimity and as a clear indication of his respect for her work, Eastlake gave her all the material and references he had collected himself. Despite such achievements, however, Anna had to make her writing non-polemical and uncontroversial, weeding out phrases that seemed too explicitly feminist in an effort to get readers, both male and female, to take her views seriously. To sell her books to a wide public, it was critical that she seemed respectable, inoffensive and unchallenging. She had to consider what her writing might imply about other areas of her life, and was always conscious of her sensitive position as a woman in the masculine world of art scholarship.

  Developing scholarship as an integral part of her collecting, Charlotte would certainly have been aware of the potential hazards of her situation. As far as we know, she was not particularly feminist in her views – her journals give little indication that she was interested in feminist issues – nor was she keen to disrupt her family life with controversy. But she was naturally intellectual and ambitious, and, while she may not have been willing to take up a wider feminist cause, her marriages, her close involvement with the Dowlais steel business and her Welsh studies all indicate that she was happy to challenge, on a personal level, Victorian preconceptions about what she could do as a woman. As her collecting developed, so too did this challenge to convention. Privately, without fuss, she was developing a level of erudition to rival any male collector’s. Wide reading, learned discussion, an excellent visual memory and a talent for thinking on her feet got Charlotte the pieces she wanted. The history of the gourd-shaped bottle shows how her scholarship was constantly evolving and how important this was to her reputation as a collector.

  Her knowledge paid dividends. In one ‘very bad’ shop in Genoa, ‘a dilettante shoemakers’, Charlotte was offered a set of cups decorated with red landscapes. They were fine and unexpected, and they immediately attracted her attention. When she turned one of them over to check the maker’s mark, she found the name ‘Jacques Boselly’ painted crudely across the base, linking them to a small eighteenth-century ceramics factory in Savona, near Genoa in Italy. If they were genuinely Boselly cups, they were quite rare and desirable, a real find. But Charlotte continued turning them over. Three displayed the same scrawled signature. But fortunately Charlotte was not content until she had turned each one of the set and peered closely at every scratch and imprint, and that’s when she saw something else: the name ‘Wedgwood’ impressed into the glaze: ‘I confess the English name was rather faint so that the ingenious foreigner might be excused from expecting that it would escape ordinary attention,’ she explained in her journal. At a time when Wedgwood was out of fashion and distinctly less collectable than Boselly, the dealer had tried to upgrade the English cups into something more sought after and valuable. But those with a good knowledge of the trade were not to be so easily fooled: ‘the mark was quite strong enough to be quite clear to the initiated,’ Charlotte noted.8

  In the competitive world of European collecting, there was no substitute for acquiring better knowledge than other collectors, or acquiring it more quickly. Charlotte’s scholarship gave her the opportunity to make profitable purchases and to speculate for the future. At the dealers in Genoa, Charlotte was quite as happy with Wedgwood cups as with Boselly. She had already decided that Wedgwood was quality china, worth collecting, and this was another opportunity to add the English ware to her collection at a time when ceramics from the factory were of little interest to the majority of European collectors and consequently relatively cheap to acquire. And as Charlotte’s knowledge grew, so did the opportunities for such bargains. In March 1872, she was scouring the shops in Amsterdam when she noticed a china figu
re of a youth holding a comb. It was a fine piece, and in perfect condition. Charlotte at once recognized that it was scarce Bristol china, a hard, white eighteenth-century porcelain manufactured from Cornish china-clay and much sought after for the quality of its glaze. She was so astonished at the unexpected discovery ‘that I put it down again, hardly believing my eyes at so great a find’. But looking around, she found that the dealer was paying little attention to her, and, when she tentatively asked him about the piece, she realized that he ‘had no idea what it was’. Taking advantage of his ignorance, she struck a deal for the figure, along with two sauceboats which caught her eye, for £7. The shrewd speculation, Charlotte noted, ‘amply repays the trouble of a seven hour drive’.9

  A few years later, in early 1880, she instructed one of her French contacts, a dealer named Fournier (possibly the son of the Fournier who had disappeared during the violence of the Paris Commune) to buy on her behalf a small figurine. Charlotte had glimpsed the piece only once, briefly, as it lay unregarded in a display window, but she was immediately sure it was sixteenth-century Spanish. Fournier disagreed. Since he was being paid for his trouble, he continued to act on Charlotte’s orders, but he maintained that the piece was nothing more than a modern reproduction. He wrote to her, warning her that she was likely to be disappointed, and finally he brought the figure to her rooms at the Hotel Drouot in Paris. The minute she saw it, Charlotte knew she was right. And her instincts were, once again, impeccable. After some straightforward research, she was able to show beyond doubt that the piece was special, and a bargain: ‘It proved to be, as I anticipated, a very fine specimen of Spanish Cinquecento art, and we were wonderfully fortunate to obtain it for about £8. It was worth quite 3 times as much, but the ignorant French dealers did not know it.’10